When Jennifer Lopez went back into the studio to make what would become This Is Me...Now—the follow-up to her 2002 album that was inspired, in part, by her then-new romance with Ben Affleck—she went back to the original source material: a collection of love letters that he had held on to after they broke up and given to her after they reconciled nearly two decades later. “He's a writer, so he writes long, beautiful, poetic letters,” Lopez tells Apple Music's Zane Lowe. “I brought them in there, and that really set the tone for everybody [working on the album] to understand what the mission was. We're going to [capture] this feeling of this journey, and what I've learned about love, which I've been searching for my whole life. What is it? What does it mean? Does it exist? We all get sold this bill of goods, like these magical things don't exist in life, and they do. Magic is out there.” That’s not to say This Is Me...Now is all loving affirmations and “happy, sunshiny hearts and flowers,” as she puts it—like “Can’t Get Enough,” the album’s flirtatious first single—and fond looks back at the past. “Broken Like Me,” which was inspired by the dissolution of their relationship back in 2004, was particularly difficult for Affleck to hear while she was recording it. In the years they spent apart, Lopez and Affleck found love again, started families, weathered painful breakups, and worked on themselves before they found each other again in different seasons of their lives. “The whole story has to do with how you get there, and the difficult, really challenging things we have to go through as people to understand ourselves, and to get to a place where we can do the thing that human beings are meant to do in this life, which is love,” she says. “That's the big mission; that's the goal. You get to the end of your life, you go, ‘I love somebody, and they loved me, too.’”